Wednesday, July 25, 2012

On Not Being a Winner

Yesterday I received the best possible news about my manuscript The Barons and Other Poems: Omnidawn Publishing has accepted the book for publication and will bring it out in Fall 2014. This is thrilling news for a number of reasons. One is that Omnidawn is one of the most exciting, relevant, and hard-working presses that the contemporary publishing scene has to offer. Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan have built an astonishing list in its decade or so of existence: their authors include Cal Bedient, Norma Cole, Gillian Conoley, Richard Greenfield, Lyn Hejinian, Paul Hoover, Devin Johnston, Myung Mi Kim, Hank Lazer, Laura Moriarty, Craig Santos Perez, Bin Ramke, Aaron Shurin, Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, and Tyrone Williams, all people whose work I respect and in some cases revere. They have demonstrated a level of commitment to their authors that is unparalleled, working tirelessly and of course without compensation to edit, design, and promote their books. But most of all, I’m excited to be publishing The Barons and Other Poems with Omnidawn because for the first time since my chapbook Hope & AnchorI’ll be working with a publisher directly, without having to win a contest first.

I won’t pretend to be outraged by the contest model that has
been so good to me: I’ve won four of ‘em, after all. No one likes to pay
reading fees, but for the most part I haven’t minded subsidizing presses whose
work I respect. Omnidawn has three poetry contests, without which I’m sure the
press would not be able to produce books in anywhere near the same quantity or
quality. This time, I neither entered nor won a contest: there will be no prize
money, nor can my book be touted as a prize winner. This is a good thing. It
means that the person who fell in love with my book, who believes it to be
worth devoting a considerable quantity of time, energy, and money, will be
devoting herself personally to its success. It’s far better, in my view, than
having an outside judge pass along a winning manuscript to an editor who,
however dedicated, won’t own the
process in the way she would if she had chosen the book herself.

It’s not my intention here to disparage my former editors:
far from it. No editor has worked harder on my behalf than Jim Schley at TupeloPress did when he was in charge of shepherding Severance Songs through the publication process: he even
functioned, wonder of wonders, as an editor,
making suggestions and recommending cuts and rearrangements that helped to make
it a better book. That’s shockingly rare in the poetry world; I suspect it’s
become rare in the world of fiction and trade books too. I look forward to a similar back-and-forth
with my Omnidawn editors. But I feel somehow that the exchange we have is going
to be more profound, more fundamentally collaborative, and cut more closely to
the bone of what I’m trying to accomplish with this particular book.

The Barons and Other
Poems is my most ambitious book yet, in part because it’s a collection (as the title implies) and
not a “concept” book or a “project” in the way of my other books (and of so many other poetry books published today--the vast majority, I'd say). It’s open. I have a longstanding interest in
open form in the narrow sense, and you can see evidence of that in almost
everything I’ve written, even the sonnets of Severance Songs. But this is the first time that I feel I’ve
produced a truly open work in the sense that each poem makes a gesture, hazards something, contradicts itself or
what’s gone before, without ever, as Mallarmé said, abolishing chance—the possibility of things
going (always already being) disastrously wrong. The fault is in our stars and in ourselves. There’s an intrinsic
roughness and shagginess to this work. I feel so lucky to have found a
publisher who will respect that, and may seek even to enhance it, and to
complete the book’s gesture which I have come to understand can only happen when
a book is properly designed AND distributed AND promoted—talked about—believed
in—by its publisher.

I am sure there will be disagreements and disappointments,
but I am equally sure that this is happening at the right time, with the right
publisher, and the right book.

And not least of all with this news comes a sense of
liberation: the ability to close the door on one body of work and to open the
door onto something unprecedented and unpredictable. Will it look like poetry,
or fiction, or something else?

That's one of my own lines. From an untitled (they're all untitled) severance song: After form fails a furling, reports dying away,...

Followers

The Barons

“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

Severance Songs

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

Hope & Anchor

Compos(t)ition Marble

Selah

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Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.